Cephalosporin C is a natural metabolite which is obtained by fermentation of the filamentous fungus Acremonium chrysogenum (referred to as A. chrysogenum hereinbelow) on an industrial scale. This substance is an important precursor for a number of semi-synthetic cephalosporin antibiotics. The cephalosporin substance class is of great therapeutic importance. Increases in the yields of industrial cephalosporin fermentation depend essentially on continuous genetic strain improvement, in addition to improvements in process technology. More and more to the fore of modern methods of the said strain improvement is the transformation of producer strains with specific genes which have a potential for increasing production. A small group of known cephalosporin biosynthesis genes may be suspected, via the knowledge of biochemical relationships of cephalosporin biosynthesis, of having a strain improvement potential. Amplification, i.e. increasing the copy number of such known genes, indeed shows experimentally partly a significant improvement in the productivity of a producer organism. However, the group of known genes for which a strain improvement potential can be predicted from scientific plausibility assessments is very small. In addition to these known biosynthesis genes, however, an unknown number of further genes may be suspected which likewise cause a production-increasing potential by way of amplification. Frequently, the function of such genes is unknown, since there is currently still very little understanding of the entirety of cellular processes which influence cephalosporin biosynthesis. Strategies for identifying further genes with production-increasing potential are therefore of great importance.
It is thus a central object of the present invention to find such a further, hitherto unknown gene. It is thus an object of the present invention to provide a nucleic acid and vectors which code for new protein from A. chrysogenum and can be used for transformation of an A. chrysogenum host cell so that this host cell is capable of providing cephalosporin C in good yields. It is another object of the present invention to provide such a transformed host cell. Finally, it is another object of the present invention to provide a process for production of cephalosporin C using the said transformed host cell.